CHTC Services for Research Computing
This page outlines CHTC services offered to UW - Madison affiliates and general guidelines for their use. Users with existing accounts should also refer to our User Expectations pages for more specific limits and guidelines for using CHTC services. To apply for a CHTC account, fill out this form: Getting Started
Overview
CHTC’s Research Computing activities aim to empower the research and teaching mission of the University of Wisconsin - Madison by providing access to scalable computing and data capacity.
Access to standard CHTC services is free of charge.
Who can use CHTC services?
Access to CHTC services is available to:
- Current UW Madison affiliates (faculty, students, staff, post-docs)
- Current UW System affiliates
- Collaborators of UW Madison affiliates, where collaborator access benefits the work of the UW - Madison affiliate, e.g. recently graduated students, collaborators on multi-institution grants
Computing
CHTC operates two large-scale computing systems.
High Throughput Computing
- Roughly 15k CPU cores, 100+ GPUs
- Additional capacity available via campus HTC systems and the national OSPool.
- Single user: 10s - 1000s of tasks (jobs) running at once
- Scheduled using HTCondor
High Performance Computing (SPARK)
- About 8k CPU cores
- Infiniband networking for multi-node capability
- Single user: up to 10 jobs running or 720 cores in use
- Jobs are scheduled using SLURM job scheduling software
CHTC computing capacity is allocated via a fair-share scheduling algorithm. For groups that require additional or dedicated computing capacity, there is the option to purchase hardware. See our description of buy-in options here: CHTC Buy-In Overview
Data
CHTC provides space for data, software and other files that are being used for active computational work. Our file systems have no backup or other redundancy and should not be used as a storage solution. Researchers are assigned a default space quota when their account is created that can be increased upon request. For needs greater than 2TB or for longer-term projects, contact us to sign a data use memorandum of understanding.
Software
CHTC systems support software that runs on Linux. Whether or not licensed software can be run on CHTC depends significantly on the type of license.
Both CHTC computing systems support containers.
Citing CHTC
In order to track our scientific impact we ask that users cite a DOI in all publications that have benefited from our services. See Citing CHTC for more details.